Chatting Farmers: Workie Talkie in AgroSense

One of the great aspects of building an application based on the NetBeans Platform is the ability to quite easily integrate NetBeans IDE plugins into your application. Building a highly modular farm management application is a lot of work. A lot of features which would make AgroSense even more useful and appealing just don’t have a high priority because there are so many other important things to build. Proper farm registration and management takes precedence over cool features like an embedded chat function or twitter integration.

A few days ago the beta version of the Workie Talkie plugin for NetBeans IDE was announced. Supplying one of the “cool” nice to have features for AgroSense, an embedded chat function, this immediately caught my attention. Integration of other open source components is fully in line with the basic philosophy of AgroSense to begin with. So I decided to give it a go. Workie Talkie is built as a NetBeans plugin and AgroSense is based on the NetBeans Platform, so theoretically adding a standard NetBeans plugin to AgroSense should not be a problem.

1. I downloaded the Workie Talkie plugin from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/workietalkie/
2. Started AgroSense and opened the Plugin Manager.
3. Added the downloaded plugins.
4. Manually restarted AgroSense.
5. Entered my GTalk credentials and started chatting.

This entire process took me a whopping 5 minutes! Embedded GTalk chat functionality in AgroSense, how cool is that:

At the same time I was chatting to myself in AgroSense, I could see the same conversation in the Gmail tab of my browser: